Suchergebnisse

"The United States Constitution insures that all persons born in the US are citizens with equal protection under the law. But in today's America, the US-born children of undocumented immigrants--over four million of them--do not enjoy fully the benefits of citizenship or of feeling that they belong. Children in mixed-status families are forgotten in the loud and discordant immigration debate. They live under the constant threat that their parents will suddenly be deported. Their parents face impossible decisions: make their children exiles or make them orphans. In Forgotten Citizens, Luis Zayas holds a mirror to a nation in crisis, providing invaluable perspectives for anyone brave enough to look. Zayas draws on his extensive work as a mental health clinician and researcher to present the most complete picture yet of how immigration policy subverts children's rights, harms their mental health, and leaves lasting psychological trauma. We meet Virginia, a kindergartener so terrified of revealing her family's status that she took her father's warning don't say anything so literally she hadn't spoken in school in over a year. We hear from Brandon, exiled with his family to Mexico, who worries that his father will die in the desert trying to immigrate again. Children like Virginia and Brandon have been silenced and their stories largely overlooked in the broader debates about immigration policy. As this book demonstrates, we can no longer afford to ignore them"--Provided by publisher

This book presents the anatomy of experiences before, during, and after suicide attempts and suggests new ways of understanding them. More importantly, it offers researchers and clinicians a model for understanding and working with young Latinas and their families in a compassionate, culturally sensitive manner.

Advocacy for immigrant families undertaken by social workers, attorneys, and other supporters to protect against deportation, detention, and unfair government policies occurs mostly in immigration and federal courts. Social workers bring unique knowledge and skills that enhance legal teams' representation of immigrants. This paper provides case illustrations of social work's contribution in three types of legal actions. One illustration from immigration court demonstrates the social work consultant's role in cancellation of removal cases when undocumented immigrants have US-citizen children. A second case is a federal class-action lawsuit to end the detention of asylum-seeking families. The third case was a federal lawsuit to dismantle bureaucratic policies and procedures that undermined the legal rights and well-being of unaccompanied children. In each of these actions, social work knowledge influenced lawsuits that can have lasting policy impact. While this paper focuses on social work advocacy in immigration cases, social work extends to many other areas of advocacy in the legal system. Social work consultants must have a clear understanding of what the attorneys are requesting to ensure that they have the requisite knowledge and skill to be optimally effective and to practice ethically within the scope of their expertise. Other implications include maintaining familiarity with contemporary social and behavioral research and providing expertise confidently in written reports and oral testimony in court. When social workers bring their expertise to legal teams in immigration cases, they promote the profession's expertise and help families facing oppressive policies.

Advocacy for immigrant families undertaken by social workers, attorneys, and other supporters to protect against deportation, detention, and unfair government policies occurs mostly in immigration and federal courts. Social workers bring unique knowledge and skills that enhance legal teams' representation of immigrants. This paper provides case illustrations of social work's contribution in three types of legal actions. One illustration from immigration court demonstrates the social work consultant's role in cancellation of removal cases when undocumented immigrants have US-citizen children. A second case is a federal class-action lawsuit to end the detention of asylum-seeking families. The third case was a federal lawsuit to dismantle bureaucratic policies and procedures that undermined the legal rights and well-being of unaccompanied children. In each of these actions, social work knowledge influenced lawsuits that can have lasting policy impact. While this paper focuses on social work advocacy in immigration cases, social work extends to many other areas of advocacy in the legal system. Social work consultants must have a clear understanding of what the attorneys are requesting to ensure that they have the requisite knowledge and skill to be optimally effective and to practice ethically within the scope of their expertise. Other implications include maintaining familiarity with contemporary social and behavioral research and providing expertise confidently in written reports and oral testimony in court. When social workers bring their expertise to legal teams in immigration cases, they promote the profession's expertise and help families facing oppressive policies.

In this article, we focus on the developmental contexts of middle childhood and early adolescence to explore the lives of citizen-children living with undocumented Mexican parents. We draw on the concept of belonging to highlight the distinct situation of citizen-children and the ways in which they come to understand their place in a world. To capture the experiences of citizen-children born to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents and their sense of belonging to place and community, we conducted in-depth interviews with 83 citizen-children in late childhood and early adolescence in three groups. One group of citizen-children lived in Mexico after their parents' deportation. Another group remained in the U.S. after parents were detained or deported. The third group did not have a parent in deportation proceedings. Qualitative analyses of children's recorded interviews revealed their experiences of discovery of parents' undocumented status; political, social and material exclusion; and rupture of family ties. Children were keenly aware that birthright citizenship afforded them numerous privileges unavailable to their parents, but that it did not extend to the very privilege, they valued most: an intact family. The loss of parents through detention or deportation forced some children to consider existential questions about who they were and where they belonged, sometimes pitting family members against one another. Our findings suggest that belonging is intimately tied to broader forces of legal persecution that go beyond individualized notions of illegality and have deep, possibly lasting psychological effects.

The high rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Hispanic females in the United States have been well established by epidemiological and clinical studies. In this paper, we review the research history of Latina suicide attempts and their characteristics. Then we apply multi-faceted conceptual and empirical criteria found in the anthropological and psychiatric literature about cultural idioms of distress to the suicide attempts of young Latinas. We contrast the suicide-attempt phenomenon to the well-known ataque de nervios and propose that the phenomenon may reflect a developmental or cultural variant of the ataque. The attempt-as-idiom proposition is intended to invite discussion that can deepen our understanding of the cultural roots of the suicide attempts and their possible designation as cultural idiom. Establishing the meaning of suicide attempts within a cultural perspective can assist psychological and psychiatric research and clinical interventions.